He just had one of his first grown-up conversations with a family friend—and he was both thrilled and nervous. He couldn’t believe what he had heard about—something that was new and cool—and he was so excited! But the brown-haired, brown-eyed 12-year-old was a bit hesitant to ask his parents. He wasn’t sure whether they would go for it. After all, it would cost a lot of money—$1,000—and they weren’t the most technical people in the world, so would they understand how much he wanted it? All he knew was that he had to have it.
Arnold Blinn (S’87) remembers well the day he asked his parents to buy him his first personal computer, a TRS-80. “Today a kid asks for a $1,000 electronic gadget, no big deal,” he says. “Back then you didn’t do that. But my parents very quickly saw that this was something big, and they let me buy one.” He didn’t know how to program it (it ran BASIC, common in most computers at the time), so the youngster simply sat down and read through the books until he knew how. “In that process, I knew I loved doing this—it’s great, it’s like solving little puzzles all the time. I got it … and I loved it … and I started using it more and more and more. … I feel I was extremely fortunate to have that because it really shaped where I am today,” he says.
When it came time to choose a college, Blinn, who was born in Pittsburgh but grew up in Harrisburg, quickly honed in on Carnegie Mellon as the college. “There were two reasons I chose to apply only to Carnegie Mellon,” he says. “First, it was one of the top three schools in computer science. And second—location, location, location—I had a lot of family there but was also far enough away from home [Harrisburg], so it was a nice balance for me.”
After graduation, Blinn moved to San Francisco, where he worked for several companies as a software engineer, including a small start-up company. “After one and a half years, I decided that if I was going to do a start-up, I didn’t want to do it for someone else—I was going to do my own.”
So in 1991, he and another Carnegie Mellon graduate, Greg Stein (E’89), and two other partners started eShop Inc., a company devoted to online commerce. Blinn shakes his head as he remembers the office setup: four grown men in a cramped office, folding tables from Costco as desks, personal computers they each bought and/or made themselves, and no office network because networks weren’t common at the time. Instead, they had a program they jokingly dubbed “Flynet,” a floppy disk with the name “Flynet” written on it—when one of them needed to trade files, someone would copy the disk and throw it across the office like a Frisbee. “I still have the Flynet disk, actually,” Blinn says with a laugh.
In 1994, the partners created one of the first online shopping networks, which involved putting a disk in a computer, dialing up, and then clicking on items to purchase. Two years later, as a promotional tool, they sent out sample disks—“we carpet-bombed the world!” One of the disks happened to land on the desk of a Microsoft executive, who wanted to know more.
A meeting was scheduled.
Blinn and his partners weren’t quite sure how open to be with their information with the industry giant, but they finally devised a plan. “Hey, let’s just open the kimono, show him what we have, and optimize for success.” This turned out to be a smart move. Microsoft quickly bought them out in a stock deal reportedly worth $43 million. (By taking into account Microsoft stock splits, such a buyout today would be equivalent to $175 million). Blinn and most of the eShop employees went to work at Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters.
Blinn has been a software architect engineer for the past 11 years at Microsoft. He creates programs and designs software so it works at a high level with other programs. Currently, he is helping to develop the Windows Live Platform Division. He says his degree has been especially relevant. “The education I received at Carnegie Mellon is particularly well suited to my job, at least the curriculum I took, because we think in abstract terms and how things can collaborate and interact together.”
Although he could afford to step away from it all, his enthusiasm for his job is not unlike that of the 12-year-old boy who first learned of computers. “I really love versions twos and threes of projects. I don’t like working on versions fours and fives and sixes. The initial version is fun as well, but you’re making a big guess as to what the market wants, and the second and third one is about really getting it right,” he says. “My reputation professionally is very much as a guy who gets things done, as an executer—someone who delivers. So that’s my skill … and when you pair me with the big idea guy, it’s very powerful.”
He hopes to get things done for the University as one of the newest members of the Alumni Association board. He doesn’t have an agenda, but he wants Carnegie Mellon to be ready for the next step in technology. When he was on campus, there wasn’t email, instant messaging, or texting. He won’t predict what’s next, only that “there will be the next big thing—that’s a given.”
